Section 1.2. BPM Acid Test: The Process-Oriented Application


1.2. BPM Acid Test: The Process-Oriented Application

Irrational exuberance about BPM might compel a vendor or customer to believe that BPM is the solution to all enterprise application problems. After all, BPM empowers the business analyst, who knows the application requirements best, to create a design or flowchart for the high-level logic. And after all, what is an enterprise application but a set of logic? The flaw in this argument is that the logic of a process is not its procedural implementation but its declarative dynamic behavior, or its change in state over time as events occur.

Many BPM vendors provide a graphical process editor that lets the end user design a process by dragging boxes and arrows onto a canvas. The drawing that the user creates looks like a program, but it is really a kind of state diagram for the process. A good BPM product makes it relatively easy to turn the diagram into an executable application; it is a matter of filling in the blanks. But this ease does not make the product the right choice to build all executable applications.

BPM is suited only for applications with an essential sense of state or processthat is, applications that are process-oriented . An application passes the BPM acid test if it is legitimately process-oriented. The travel agency application, for example, passes the test because it is best understood in terms of the state of the itinerary and is defined at all times by how far the itinerary has gotten. Other typical characteristics of a process-oriented application include the following:


Long-running

From start to finish, the process spans hours, days, weeks, months, or more.


Persisted state

Because the process is long-lived, its state is persisted to a database so that it outlasts the server hosting it.


Bursty, sleeps most of the time

The process spends most of its time asleep, waiting for the next triggering event to occur, at which point it wakes up and performs a flurry of activities.


Orchestration of system or human communications

The process is responsible for managing and coordinating the communications of various system or human actors.

Some process-oriented applications have only a subset of these characteristics. The processes of the Message Broker application presented in Chapter 11, for example, are short-lived and never sleep, running from start to finish in a single burst with no stopping points. But they satisfyindeed, epitomizethe orchestral quality, and hence are perfectly suited to a BPM implementation.

The boxes and arrows of BPM are a poor fit for nonprocess-oriented applications. For example, in an automated teller machine, which lets users query their account balance, withdraw cash, deposit checks and cash, and pay billsany sense of process is fleeting and inessential; an ATM is an online transaction processor, not a process-oriented application.



    Essential Business Process Modeling
    Essential Business Process Modeling
    ISBN: 0596008430
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2003
    Pages: 122
    Authors: Michael Havey

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